Felipe Calderon

Felipe de Jesus Calderon Hinojosa (18 August 1962-) was President of Mexico from 1 December 2006 to 30 November 2012, succeeding Vicente Fox and preceding Enrique Pena Nieto. He was a member of the National Action Party.

Biography
Felipe de Jesus Calderon Hinojosa was born in Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico on 18 August 1962, the son of PAN co-founder Luis Calderon Vega. The young Calderon was active in his father's campaigns, and he studied at the Autonomous Institute of Technology of Mexico and Harvard University. Calderon would soon rise to prominence in the PAN, serving as its national president from 1996 to 1999. After PAN member Vicente Fox was elected President in 2000, Calderon was appointed Director of Banobras, a state-owned bank, and he also served as Energy Secretary. In 2006, members of his party chose him as the PAN presidential candidate, and he defeated the left-wing populist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

As President of Mexico, Calderon decriminalized illegal immigration into Mexico, stabilized the price of tortillas, capped the salaries of public servants, expanded the healthcare infrastructure of Mexico, raised awareness of environmental issues, kept prices and interest rates low during the Great Recession, accelerating the building of public works projects, expanded national trade, ordered a raise in the salaries of policemen and Mexican Army personnel, intensified drug enforcement operations (leading to the Mexican Drug War), and took down 25 of the 37 top drug lords in Mexico through death or imprisonment. Despite this, Calderon suffered from mediocre approval ratings, with his 2007 approval rating of 58% dropping to 46% in 2012. Calderon was controversial for winning the presidential election by a very small margin, for allowing the United States to set up surveillance operations in his country, and for starting a drug war that cost 83,191 lives during his administration alone. His party lost the 2012 election to Institutional Revolutionary Party candidate Enrique Pena Nieto.